NBA Betting – Portland Trail Blazers at Brooklyn Nets

Portland Trail Blazers at Brooklyn Nets (-7, 201.5 o/u)

The Portland Trail Blazers (50-26, 19-18 away) clinched a playoff berth on the weekend and are now merely battling for seeding, sitting just 1.5 games back of third-place Memphis in the Western Conference. Tonight (7:00 PM Eastern), the Blazers will be facing a desperate Brooklyn Nets team (35-41, 16-20 home) that is in a pitched battle for one of the final postseason spots in the East.

The Blazers clinched the Northwest Division and reached the 50-win milestone with a 99-90 win over the Pelicans on Saturday.

“It’s something to be proud of, which we are, but we’re not done,” coach Terry Stotts said. “We’ve got to continue to get better and prepare for the playoffs.”

For tonight’s make-up game (which was supposed to be played back in January), Portland is a seven-point dog. The team is leaving LaMarcus Aldridge, Nic Batum, and Chris Kaman at home for the one-game road trip out east.

The Nets, meanwhile, are seventh in the Eastern Conference, just half a game above the Boston Celtics and one and a half ahead of the Indiana Pacers and Miami Heat.  The Nets had been hot of late, winning six in a row, but they had that streak abruptly snapped with a crushing 133-99 loss at Atlanta on Saturday.

“They beat us … From start to finish,” Nets coach Lionel Hollins said after the loss. “It was a good whipping. There’s nothing else that I can say. They dominated the game.”

In the trends, the Blazers have won seven of the last ten against the Nets, including the last three in a row. But without Aldridge, Kaman, and Batum – and the Nets playing desperate basketball – look for Brooklyn to cover (-7) against the tired Blazers.

(Photo credit: Shinya Suzuki (flickr) [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode]. Photo has been cropped.)